Aspire and Bayshore Solutions worked to envision, design, develop and market the brand’s new online presence, consolidating 10 separate websites with more than 100 alias domains, and a corporate domain that was changed to AspireOnline.com—designed to preserve an uninterrupted navigation flow with its hundreds of thousands of users. Leveraging Sitefinity CMS and Kendo UI® by Progress, the new site accomplishes several goals:
- Position Aspire as the growing market leader in the smart retirement solutions industry
- Offer new and innovative resources and tools to increase customer engagement and conversion
- Improve the directed paths for target audience groups with the sub-goals of increasing communication and conversion
- Enable a subscription-based portal for richer content, online proposal generation and value-added content not offered in the main areas of the site
- Website design features include a fully responsive website, enabling ease of navigation and customized presentation for any screen size. Custom graphics give the website design a truly unique visual brand experience.
The team used Kendo UI to enrich the site with graphical elements such as ROI calculators and calendars. Additionally, they built an MVC widget for the main navigation to enable fast integration of customized design elements. This also enabled the front-end developer to style the HTML and CSS natively, as the team was unfamiliar with how to customize the built-in Sitefinity navigation widget.
“We have developed several tools that enable users to search and filter large data in a consumable manner,” said Hourigan. One example is the Plan Search Tool, which leverages Kendo UI to present investment advisor information to thousands of Aspire’s 403(b) retirement plan partners and customers, including public school employees. This Plan Search Tool receives up to one million visitors per year, offloading some groundwork for advisors while providing additional value to plan participants.
“Using Kendo UI to build the various components has enabled us to help our partners get access to a complex market segment and tell a visual story that influences the decision to save for retirement,” said Aspire’s Reed. “For example, we can quickly serve up a geographical list of advisors in specific school districts for quick reference and on-the-spot enrollment, to start a retirement plan. The solution’s flexibility has opened up huge opportunities for providing our advisors with better solutions to serve their customers.”
Because the new site is built on Sitefinity CMS, Aspire’s web administrators can easily and instantly manage and update the site. Sitefinity CMS also enables enterprise expansion and scaling, multiple page type templates, HTML content input through a WYSIWYG editor, user and user role-based website management and permission-based security.
A unique feature of the Aspire website design is the custom implementation of the InvestDesignSM Center advisor and TPA portal, a robust proposal generator to support clients and enable a professional, interactive and white-labeled presentation to end users. Bayshore Solutions' developers leveraged the Sitefinity CMS mobile module and integrated Bootstrap into master pages, a front-end web development framework that helps improve responsiveness. The scalable infrastructure of the Sitefinity platform enabled the developers to build multiple lead generation tools and automate data capture for daily proposals, while taking advantage of the platform’s advanced user role controls to increase efficiency without jeopardizing security.
"There are many reasons we chose the Sitefinity CMS and Kendo UI—agility, scalability and the robust nature of CMS infrastructure were all deciding factors,” said Nicholas Betlow, Creative Director, Aspire Financial Services. “We’re constantly evolving our website and developing new ways to interact with our clients, such as building new applications; with Sitefinity CMS we can develop dynamic, powerful tools and go to market quickly with a very short development sprint."